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Inside the Lucasfilm datacenter
passthecrackpipe writes "Where can you find a (rhetorical) 11.38 petabits per second bandwidth? It appears to be inside the Lucasfilm Datacenter. At least, that is the headline figure mentioned in this report on a tour of the datacenter. The story is a bit light on the down-and-dirty details, but mentions a 10 gig ethernet backbone (adding up the bandwidth of a load of network connections seems to be how they derived the 11.38 petabits p/s figure. In that case, I have a 45 gig network at home.) Power utilization is a key differentiator when buying hardware, a "legacy" cycle of a couple of months, and 300TB of storage in a 10.000 square foot datacenter. To me, the story comes across as somewhat hyped up — "look at us, we have a large datacenter" kind of thing, "look how cool we are". Over the last couple of years, I have been in many datacenters, for banks, pharma and large enterprise to name a few, that have somewhat larger and more complex setups."
San Diego Super Computing Center (SDSC) has 2 Petabytes of online Storage with 400TB for researchers. They have 18PB of archival tape storage.
a tures/print.php/3634881
Still....I like datacenters. The hum of equipment. 65 degree temps and lower. I once had my cube re-located to a tape library. Quiet...peaceful place
http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/hardware/fe
Is that the speed you can talk at?
Still, I'm pretty sure that Google's new datacenter wipes its ass with a datacenter the size of this one.
I'm pretty sure Google's datacentre has evolved beyond the need for an ass.
Rod Taylor
...would post this as a news item. Front page, too.
Let's break this down submission down..
"Hi. I found this article on the web that totally didn't impress me, I think they fiddled with the numbers to make themselves look better than they are, and overall I really couldn't give a shite."
Yes. Obvious front page material for a Sunday!
Nope. They run LucasOS. It's perfect for their needs, since it's constantly being updated to suit his vision.
This guy's the limit!
Well passthecrackpipe, if you and your vast knowledge of large scale datacenters are not impressed with the story, why the hell did you submit it?
and format it?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
So why submit this if you don't like it? Why not at least title it "Lucasfilm thinks it's soooo great."? I'm sure you've seen bigger data centers, and you can type 500 lines of code a minute, and maybe you defeated a ninja in hand-to-hand combat, but for the rest of us "normal" nerds it's still neat to read about the machines that get the work done in a business. Of course it's hyped up, it's a press release disguised as news. Take it for what it is, relax, and try to imagine those 2,000 servers in a secret cave under your house, manipulating the stock market in your favor. That's what I do.
As in reference to THX 1138?
Of course, it could just be a coincidence.
I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
As somebody who (ab)uses that particular rig daily, the article misses the point about what's so awesome about the system.
It's a good sized datacenter, but what it's able to support in processing ability is the impressive part, and that the fat bandwidth runs at capacity almost all of the time by the demands of processing jobs. Proprietary software doles out jobs 24/7 to thousands of procs all over campus-- including artists' desktop machines-- for heavy duty computation: rendering and simulation and whatever it takes.
I can't imagine a facility where so many people are creating and pumping so much data around.
I toured their new facility in San Francisco. They have over 300 10Gbps ports and all PCs are connected via gigabit. Their datacenter was 2/3 full of dual-Opteron servers running SuSE Linux (though they were considering switching). Their server room was spotless. No cables were visible anywhere, but I did see a Roomba moving about the floor. The fellow who ran it said that since they're ILM, they have to have droids.
The facility was absolutely beautiful. When going between two buildings on an overhead walkway I saw the Golden Gate bridge with a nice orange sunset behind it. I wish I had my camera with me.
They said that they have many dedicated OC-48 pipes to various studios and can handle just about any format, since every studio uses their own format. They convert it to their own internal format, which I believe they open sourced.
When they moved from Skywalker Ranch, it was completely seamless. They had an OC-192 (10gbps) link running between the old and new facility as more and more equipment was migrated to the new facility but people continued to work at the old one.
-Aaron
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
A conversation overheard recently over the ether:
Lucas DC: Hi! I've got 11.38PB/s and 500TB!
Google DC: Hah! I've pulled bigger queries out of my back end.
...although I'm not quite sure what that says about Google's "interfacing preferences".
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